Jeannine Peek

Catch up to keep up: how to connect cybersecurity, AI, and the economy to rebuild our basis?

Europe faces an urgent imperative to scale cyber resilience without sacrificing AI speed, a challenge framed by AI's dual capacity to both accelerate cyberattacks and enhance defenses. The central question for the Netherlands and Europe is not whether to choose between digital sovereignty and rapid AI adoption, but how quickly they can collectively act. Participants consistently argued against treating sovereignty and speed as opposing forces, asserting that Europe, already trailing in both AI and cybersecurity capacity, cannot afford to pause. Instead, resilience is reframed as strategic choice: demanding immediate access to advanced technologies while simultaneously committing to long-term investment in domestic compute infrastructure, AI factories, talent development, and innovation ecosystems. This redefinition of sovereignty underscores that dependencies are not inherently dangerous, but rather require meticulous understanding, diversification, and proactive management. The discussion shifted from innovation's conceptualization to its practical deployment, emphasizing industry's critical role as both co-creator and launching customer for new solutions. Corporate boards must elevate AI and cyber resilience from technical afterthoughts to core governance priorities. While regional specialization can accelerate progress, security cannot be localized; the entire system remains exposed through its weakest links, necessitating a broader, interconnected approach. At the European level, pervasive fragmentation and insufficient scale present significant obstacles. Twenty-seven disparate national implementations, coupled with numerous supervisory authorities and non-interoperable national solutions, impede swift, coordinated action. The proposed remedy involves establishing larger, consolidated investment vehicles, implementing consistent pan-European regulation, developing interoperable capabilities, and instituting coordinated vulnerability reporting mechanisms. The session concluded with urgent, practical appeals: embed security throughout product lifecycles, proactively share discovered vulnerabilities, cultivate an environment that accepts experimentation and even failure, acknowledge AI's current pervasive presence, actively contribute to collective defense rather than merely participate, and foster deep collaboration across all organizational and national boundaries.